WorldwideUKIrelandAustraliamore
media.info

Recast: radio station music without the radio station

By James Cridland for media.info
Posted 21 April 2015, 6.00am edt





Recast, a new website and iPhone app, relaunches today, promising to "tune in to the playlists of your favourite radio stations without any of the usual inconvenience and interruptions".

The service monitors the songs played on radio stations across the world. Using the music curation of those radio stations, it then links with your Rdio or Spotify account to play the same music that the radio station would typically play.

The service is free, and works with free Spotify accounts. It includes a wide variety of radio station streams, which you navigate by using logos.

Stations present in the service include pages for Global Radio's XFM, KCRW and iHeartMedia's flagship KIIS-FM Los Angeles. You navigate the service using bright, clear station logos. Other channels include BBC Radio 1, NRJ and TripleJ.

The company operates from Cape Town in South Africa. While at first glance it appears to be simply stealing music curation from radio stations, the owner of Recast claims that its data is useful to radio. In an interview for Ventureburn, owner Richard Oakley says:

As [the listener] favourites and skips through tracks, we’re storing all this analytics about him which means that we can go back to 5FM and tell them that people who want to listen to 5FM hates Taylor Swift 30% more this week than they did last week. We also provide a bunch of other tools that can help radio station test new songs before playing it to half a million listeners.

The same interview criticises the radio industry for having poor measurement, and says that "the industry is going the same way as print". However, Oakley highlights that radio stations "have already built the best playlists".

Recast is on desktop and also has an iOS app.

James Cridland — James runs media.info, and is a radio futurologist: a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. He also publishes a free daily newsletter about podcasting, Podnews, and a weekly radio trends newsletter.